❖ “An Israeli aircraft attacked a motorcycle in Gaza [today] killing” Haitham Mishal, “top militant in a shadowy al-Qaida-influenced group who had been involved in a recent rocket attack on southern Israel.” Two others were wounded.

❖ Eurozone wrap-up: “Cyprus parliament [narrowly] approves bailout”, which included a “hit on depositors’ savings”; “jobless rate hits record high as inflation falls and Spanish recession deepens”; “nearly one in four young people out of work”.

❖ It’s not just Big Ag any more; it’s the Agro-Trader Nexus, with “dominant grain traders [forging] close linkages with major agribusinesses.” Includes list of the “Dominant Corporations in the World Food System”.

Money Matters USA

❖ CEO compensation to rank-and-file worker wage is estimated at 1,795 to 1, “up 20 percent since 2009″. The actual number is unknown since the Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t “drawn up the rules” to implement mandatory disclosure after three years.

❖ PA Gov. Tom Corbett (R), running for re-election with his popularity down, goes on the radio and gets defensive about his job-creating abilities: “there are many employers that say we’re looking for people but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test, a lot of them.”

❖ NC NAACP’s president and 16 others arrested outside the state senate, protesting “denying Medicaid coverage to as many as 500,000 poor people, cutting unemployment benefits”, trying to “divert money from public education” and more.

I think ConAgra should be on that list. Think of all the prepackaged prepared (and partially prepared) stuff we buy in the supermarket. Really expensive stuff for what it is. All that money customers spend goes to. . .? Cardboard box makers, advertisers, etc.

CEO compensation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just imagine how humiliating this is:

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer emerged as the Internet company’s second highest paid executive during her first five-and-half months on the job. Regulatory documents filed Tuesday revealed that Mayer received a pay package valued at $36.6 million last year.

Regarding the ACA application form, they changed it from a family form to a single person form, provided a sample for 2 people, and instructions to make more copies as needed.

The original form was lengthy because it included the forms for a family of six. If you were a single adult, you just ignored most of those pages.
The new form is short because it’s only for a single adult.
……
The result is that the new form for a family of six is 20 pages long and includes a substantial amount of time spent in front of a copier.

In regards to your earlier inquiry, fatster, about OH’s activities this past weekend, several of us had attended the Green Party of Hawaii’s State convention on Sat., what we saw was a crying shame…! We’ve got several direct actions planned for May, but, we’re really looking forward to attending the Hawaii County Democratic Party’s annual convention on May 18th…! Being held at Kilauea Military Camp in HVNP…! I’m looking forward to the volcanic eruptions…! ;-)

The forms themselves are pretty simple, the real work begins at the eligibility worker’s desk. The cost of having eligibility workers go through each form and verify each and every piece of information for everyone listed is going to be tremendous–regardless of how low the wages are for the eligibility workers. Verifying everything can be extremely time-consuming, gathering all the paperwork, documenting jobs, employers, hours, etc. Then the computations have to be made, and on and on.

So much simpler to go the Medicare route. But we know how much the insurance companies need our support. hard-earned dollars.

I’m wondering if they understand how that hurricane on Saturn that you show is generated. Since it’s just hanging there at the north pole, it can’t be like Earth hurricanes. In the Northern hemisphere such formations drift north after sucking energy into the air (consisting of nitrogen and oxygen) from warm water, while spinning because of the Coriolus force caused by the fact that the Earth rotates around an axis.

But on Saturn the atmosphere and what is under it are the same, mostly hydrogen with a little helium, just increasing in density as you go down, and presumably the same all over the planet.

It seems like it’s going to be a nightmare. For people whose income changes during the year, changing their eligibility for insurance subsidies and/or Medicaid, there’s a whole other bureaucratic mess. They can end up being required to pay back some of the subsidy, and having to switch back and forth between Medicaid and insurance.

A tank of sour water, a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia generated from refining crude oil, exploded at the Marathon Detroit Refinery in southwest Detroit during maintenance work Saturday evening. No injuries have been reported. It is unclear whether the maintenance check or some other factor sparked the explosion.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, a mandatory evacuation order was issued for 3,000 residents of Melvindale, a suburb of Detroit, due to concerns of deteriorating air quality caused by the resulting fire. Residents were told to go to the city’s ice arena-civic center.

“In the worst case scenario,” a Detroit firefighter at the station that responded told the WSWS, “if the entire plant went up, it could mean that everything within 10 miles would be gone too. This was a near miss.”

The MOD has come out against two proposed 115 foot wind power towers in Cornwall, which they assert are so big they could look like planes on monitoring equipment.

The MOD assert that the wind towers green energy devices could confuse computer systems designed to protect the UK and identify the turbines as a threat , triggering the MOD to send in fighter aircraft to investigate, and while the RAF was preoccupied, allowing real enemies to sneak into British airspace, and accordingly, are against their construction.”

Yeah. It’s a post that no corporatist jerk would want, and it’s just the sort of thing Russ would do. (I do think it’s sad in that it confirms he’s never running for office again, unless this is also a way to further burnish his already-shiny CV.)

There are lots of code words for active platitudes, that is, generalizations which would be understandable at this early stage. So far, so good. Next should come info on specific policies, what the US will actually do, and what the expected outcomes will be, and what specific latitudes a special envoy will have. Those are important.

I think having a more active presence to offset China is a major player here. But how we impact lives there is more important. Feingold seems the right person to be involved. But one caution, we should recall the situation we had versus the Soviets in Africa, where each side spread money to buy perks and “friendship.” I think it turned out more about Cold War leverage than improving people’s lives back then. How we don’t get into a similar mode next time should be on everyone’s mind.

The best article I’ve found on the Saturn hurricane, in the CSMonitor, simply says its energy source is a mystery. It also fits inside a long-observed hexagonal wind system that is analogous to our jet stream.

The NASA people have not followed the Earth-hurricane convention of naming the thing. I suggest Rhea, who was the problematic wife of Saturn-Cronus. (She fooled him by giving him a disguised stone to swallow instead of their youngest child Zeus, which caused him to vomit up all the other children he had swallowed; Hesiod, Theogony 485 ff.)

Seems like a bit of good nooz from Saudi. Making women lawyers ride bicycles to work only if accompanied by a male is pretty bad….the “domestic abuse” ie wife beating, must be really awful if they’re taking a look at it.

Sorta like what’s happening in India….things seem to have to reach critical mass before women start to go “wait a g-ddamned minute!”
Not that I think things are much better in the US, they’re just better hidden so we can feel good about ourselves.

A friend of mine hates it when I don’t qualify the word “men” to “some men”. but I told him if there were that many men on women’s side, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation

heard an interesting factoid on NPR yesterday re sewerage (1/3 untreated, i.e. raw sewage) that flowed into rivers, streams and ocean during superstorm Sandy: the volume of that sewerage was equivalent to covering Central Park to depth of 41 feet!

You’re welcome, Kassandra. Some days I’m just unable to keep all my news categories going simply because of the volume of stories coming in from one or two particular categories. So, some items have to wait for the next day. I do try to cram in all I possibly can but still keep each Roundup to 1000 words. You can probably tell the days that happens because the entries get awfully choppy (despite my efforts to keep them smooth). Please bear with me.

I object to your quoting the Israeli military about the guy they killed on a motorcycle and not even mentioning that your source, Salon, got their “information”/propaganda from the Israeli military. I don’t know anything about the guy, but you do your readers a disservice by repeating what the Israelis say about their killings as if they were facts. Would you repeat what the US government or military say about whom they kill without sourcing it? Maybe you would. I hope not. Sure, you are summarizing the news and giving the source. But it’s just like headline writers. Headlines are important and they need to be accurate. Many people don’t read beyond the headline.